The Indivisible Fight for Life

I'll begin by indicating how I became aware, very belatedly, of the
"indivisibility of life." I mention this fragment of autobiography only be cause
I think it may be useful to those who are interested in bringing others like me
- some people are not interested in making the ranks more heterogeneous, but
others are, as I've been finding out - to a realization that the "slippery
slope" is far more than a metaphor.

When I say "like me," I suppose in some respects I'm regarded
as a "liberal," although I often stray from that category, and certainly a civil
libertarian - though the ACLU and I are in profound disagreement on the matters
of abortion, handicapped infants and euthanasia, because I think they have forsaken basic
civil liberties in dealing with these issues. I'm considered a liberal except for that
unaccountable heresy of recent years that has to do with pro-life matters.

It's all the more unaccountable to a lot of people because I remain an
atheist, a Jewish atheist. (That's a special branch of the division.) I think the question
I'm most often asked from both sides is, "How do you presume to have this kind of
moral conception without a belief in God?" And the answer is, "It's
harder." But it's not impossible.

For me, this transformation started with the reporting I did on the
Babies Doe. While covering the story, I came across a number of physicians, medical
writers, staff people in Congress and some members of the House and Senate who were
convinced that making it possible for a spina bifida or a Down syndrome infant to die was
the equivalent of what they called a "late abortion." And surely, they felt,
there's nothing wrong with that.

Now, I had not been thinking about abortion at all. I had not thought
about it for years. I had what W. H. Auden called in another context a "rehearsed
response." You mentioned abortion and I would say, "Oh yeah, that's a
fundamental part of women's liberation," and that was the end of it.

But then I started hearing about "late abortion." The simple
"fact" that the infant had been born, proponents suggest, should not get in the
way of mercifully saving him or her from a life hardly worth living. At the same time, the
parents are saved from the financial and emotional burden of caring for an imperfect
child.

And then I heard the head of the Reproductive Freedom Rights unit of
the ACLU saying - this was at the same time as the Baby Jane Doe story was
developing on Long Island - at a forum, "I don't know what all this fuss is
about. Dealing with these handicapped infants is really an extension of women's
reproductive freedom rights, women's right to control their own bodies."

That stopped me. It seemed to me we were not talking about Roe v.
Wade. These infants were born. And having been born, as persons under the
Constitution, they were entitled to at least the same rights as people on death row
- due process, equal protection of the law. So for the first time, I began to
pay attention to the "slippery slope" warnings of pro-lifers I read about or had
seen on television. Because abortion had become legal and easily available, that argument
ran - as you well know - infanticide would eventually become openly
permissible, to be followed by euthanasia for infirm, expensive senior citizens.

And then in the New York Review of Books , I saw the respected,
though not by me, Australian bio-ethicist Peter Singer boldly assert that the slope was
not slippery at all, but rather a logical throughway once you got on to it. This is what
he said - and I've heard this in variant forms from many, many people who
consider themselves compassionate, concerned with the pow erless and all that.

Singer: "The pro-life groups were right about one thing, the
location of the baby inside or outside the womb cannot make much of a moral differ ence.
We cannot coherently hold it is alright to kill a fetus a week before birth, but as soon
as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive. The solution, however,"
said Singer, "is not to accept the pro-life view that the fetus is a human being with
the same moral status as yours or mine. The solution is the very opposite, to abandon the
idea that all human life is of equal worth." Which, of course, the majority of the
Court had already done in Roe v. Wade.

Recently, I was interviewing Dr. Norman Levinsky, Chief of Medicine of
Boston University Medical Center and a medical ethicist. He is one of those rare medical
ethicists who really is concerned with nurturing life, as contrasted with those of his
peers who see death as a form of treatment. He told me that he is much disturbed by the
extent to which medical decisions are made according to the patient's age. He says there
are those physicians who believe that life is worth less if you're over 80 than if you're
28.

So this is capsulizing an incremental learning process. I was beginning
to learn about the indivisibility of life. I began to interview people, to read, and I
read Dr. Leo Alexander. Joe Stanton, who must be the greatest single resource of
information, at least to beginners - and, I think, non-beginners - in
this field, sent me a whole lot of stuff, including Dr. Leo Alexander's piece in the New England Journal of Medicinein the 1940s. And then
I thought of Dr. Alexander when I saw an April 1984 piece in the New England Journal of
Medicine by 10 physicians defending the withdrawal of food and water from certain
"hopelessly ill" patients. And I found out that Dr. Alexander was still alive
then but didn't have much longer to live. And he said to Patrick Duff, who is a professor
of philosophy at Clarke University and who testified in the Brophy case, about that
article, "It is much like Germany in the 20s and 30s. The barriers against killing
are coming down."

Nearly two years later, as you know, the seven member judicial council
of the American Medical Association ruled
unanimously that it is ethical for doctors to withhold "all means of life-prolonging
medical treatment" in cluding food and water, if the patient is in a coma that is
"beyond doubt irreversible" and "there are adequate safeguards to confirm
the accuracy of the diagnosis." Now keep in mind "beyond doubt
irreversible" and "adequate safeguards to confirm the accuracy of the
diagnosis." Death, to begin with, may not be imminent for food and water to be
stopped, according to the AMA.

Then Dr. Nancy Dickey, who is chairman of the council that made that
ruling, noted that there is no medical definition of"adequate safeguards," no
checklist that doctors would have to fill out in each case. The decision would be up to
each doctor.

Aside from the ethics of this, for the moment, I would point out that
the New England Journal of Medicine, or at least the editor, Dr. Arnold Relman,
said fairly recently that there are at least 40,000 incompetent physicians in the United
States - incompetent or impaired. At least.

Back to Dr. Norman Levinsky. This is all part of this learning process.
It is not a huge step, he said, from stopping the feeding to giving the patient a little
more morphine to speed his end. I mean it is not a big step from passive to active
euthanasia.

Well, in time, a rather short period of time, I became pro-life across
the board, which led to certain social problems, starting at home. My wife's most
recurrent attack begins with, "You are creating social mischief," and there are
people at my paper who do not speak to me anymore. In most cases, that's no loss.

And I began to find out, in a different way, how the stereotypes about
pro-lifers work. When you're one of them and you read about the stereotypes, you get a
sort of different perspective.

There's a magazine called the Progressive.
It's published in Madison, Wisconsin. It comes out of the progressive movement of
Senator Lafolette, in the early part of this century. It is very liberal. Its staff, the
last I knew, was without exception pro-abortion. But its editor is a rare editor in that
he believes not only that his readers can stand opinions contrary to what they'd like to
hear, but that it's good for them. His name is Erwin Knoll and he published a long piece
by Mary Meehan, who is one of my favorite authors, which pointed out that for the left, of
all groups of society, not to understand that the most helpless members of this society
are the preborn - a word that I picked up today, better than unborn -
is strange, to say the least.

The article by Meehan produced an avalanche of letters. I have not seen
such vitriol since Richard Nixon was president - and he deserved it. One of the
infuriated readers said pro-life is only a code word representing the kind of neo-fascist,
absolutist thinking that is the antithesis to the goals of the left. What, exactly, are
the anti-abortionists for? School prayer, a strong national defense, the traditional
family characterized by patriarchal dominance. And what are they against? School busing,
homosexuals, divorce, sex education, the ERA, welfare, contraception and birth control. I
read that over five or six times and none of those applied to me.

I began to wonder if Meehan and I were the only pro-life people who
came from the left. Meehan has a long background in civil rights work. And by the way, she
said in the piece, "It is out of characterfor the left to neglect the weak and
helpless. The traditional mark of the left has been its protection of the underdog, the
weak and the poor. The unborn child is the most helpless form of humanity, even more in
need of protection than the poor tenant farmer or the mental patient. The basic instinct
of the left is to aid those who cannot aid themselves. And that instinct is absolutely
sound. It's what keeps the human proposition going."

I'll give you a quick footnote on the Progressive. Erwin Knoll
got a series of ads, tiny ads because they couldn't pay very much even at the magazine's
rates, from a group called Feminists for Life or America - a group, by the way,
that is anti-nuclear weapons and is also very pro-life in terms of being anti-abortion.
And the ads ran. There is a group called the Funding Exchange which is made up of
foundations which are put into operation and headed by the scions of the rich. These are
children who are trying to atone for their parents' rapaciousness by doing good. The
children are liberals. The Funding Exchange was so horrified to see those three tiny ads
that even though the Progressive is soundly pro-abortion, the Funding Exchange not
only dropped the grant they had given the Progressive, but they made a point of
telling Erwin Knoll that they were going to make sure that other foundations didn't give
them any money either. I'm always in trigued at how few people understand that free speech
encompasses a little more than the speech you like.

Well eventually, in addition to Mary Meehan, I found that there were a
number of other pro-lifers who also do not cherish the MX missile, William Bradford
Reynolds, or Ronald Reagan. And one of them is Juli Loesch, who writes and speaks against
both war and abortion. She is the founder of Pro-lifers for Survival, which describes
itself as a network of women and men supporting alternatives to abortion and nuclear arms.
She's rather rare, I find in my limited experience, among combatants on all sides of this
question because she is unfailingly lucid - and she has a good sense of humor.
In an interview in the U.S. Catholic she said that combining her various pro-life
preoccupations "was the most fun I've ever had in my life. It's great because you
always have common ground with someone. For example, if you're talking to pro-lifers you
can always warmup the crowd, so to speak, by saying a lot of anti-abortion stuff. After
you've got everybody celebrating the principles they all hold dear, you apply those
principles to the nuclear arms issue. For instance, I'll say 'this nuclear radiation is
going to destroy the unborn in the womb all over the world.' And then I always lay a quote
by the late Herman Kahn on them. He pointed out that about 100 million embryonic deaths
would result from limited nuclear war. One hundred million embryonic deaths is of limited
significance, he said, because human fecundity being what it is, the slight reduction in
fecundity should not be a matter of serious concern even to individuals. Tell that to a
pro-life group," she says, "and their response will be, 'That guy's an
abortionist.' Well what he was was a nuclear strategist."

I found other allies as a result of having been interviewed on National
Public Radio as the curiosity of the month. Letters came in from around the country, most
of them saying essentially what a woman from Illinois wrote:

"I feel as you do, that it is ethically, not to mention logically,
inconsistent to oppose capital punishment and nuclear armament while supporting abortion
and/or euthanasia."

The most surprising letters were two from members of the boards of two
state affiliates of the ACLU. Now I'm a former member of the national board and I was on
the New York board for 17 years, and I well know the devotion of the vast number of the
rank and file, let alone the leadership, to abortion. rights. So I was surprised to get
these letters. One board member from Maryland said we had a board meeting where we
approved with only one dissent (his) the decision of the national board to put the right
to abortion at the top of its priorities - the top of its priorities. Forget the
First Amendment and the Fourth, let Edwin Meese take care of those. There was no
discussion, he said, of the relation of abortion to capital punishment.

The most interesting letter was from Barry Nakell, who is a law profes
sor at the University of North Carolina. He is one of the founders of the affiliate of the
ACLU there. And he gave me a copy of a speech he made in 1985 at the annual meeting in
Chapel Hill of the North Carolina Civil Liberties Union. He reminded the members that the
principle of respect for the dignity of life was the basis for the paramount issue on the
North Carolina Civil Liberties Union agenda since its founding. That group was founded
because of their opposition to capital punishment. Yet, he said, supporting Roe v.
Wade, these civil libertarians were agreeing that the Constitution protects the right
to take life. The situation is a little backward, Nakell told his brothers and sisters. In
the classical position, the Constitu tion would be interpreted to protect the right to
life, and pro-abortion advocates would be pressing to relax that constitutional guarantee.
In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court turned that position upside down and the ACLU
went along, taking the decidedly odd civil libertarian position that some lives are less
worthy of protection than other lives. I asked Nakell how his heresy had been received.
Apparently they're much more polite down there than they are in New York. "With
civility," he said. As a matter of fact, he added, there were several members of the
board who had been troubled for some time, but it's interesting, they didn't quite want to
come out and say they were worried about Roe v. Wade,that they were worried about
abortion. But Nakell took the first step. He's an optimist by temperament and he tells me
he expects to make more progress. And then he told me about a bumper sticker he had seen
recently in North Carolina- "Equal Rights for Unborn Women."

For several years now I've been researching a profile of Cardinal
O'Connor of New York, which will be a book eventually. And in the course of that I came
across Cardinal Bernardin's "seamless garment" concept. It's a phrase he does
not use any more because of internal political reasons. It is now called the
"consistent ethic of life," which is fine by me. I miss "seamless
garment" though, because there's a nice literary flavor to it. But I'll accept
"consistent ethic of life." Bernardin said, in a speech at Fordham that has won
him considerable plaudits and considerable dissonance, "[N]uclear war threatens life
on a previously unimaginable scale. Abortion takes life daily on a horrendous scale.
Public executions are fast becoming weekly events in the most advanced technological
society in history, and euthanasia is now openly discussed and even advocated. Each of
these assaults on life has its own meaning and morality. They cannot be collapsed into one
problem, but they must be confronted as pieces of a larger pattern."

That had a profound effect on me. It's not new. As a matter of fact,
Juli Loesch thought of it before he did, as did the people at The Catholic Worker who
got it, of course, from Dorothy Day. And it goes further back into the centuries. But
there was something about the way Bernardin put it that hit me very hard.

So I decided by now, because I was considered by some people to be a
reliable pro-lifer, I decided to go out to Columbus, Ohio, where I had been asked to speak
at the annual Right to Life convention. And, I thought, I'm going to bring them the word,
if they haven't heard it before from Cardinal Bernardin. At first they were delighted to
see me, but that didn't last very long. Jack Willke and Mrs. Willke were there, and they
can attest to the fact that in some respects I'm lucky to be here. I pointed out that
pro-lifers - maybe this is chutzpah, telling people who have been in this all
their lives what you've discovered in 20 minutes - that pro-lifers ought to be
opposing capital punishment and nuclear armament and the Reagan budget with its dedicated
care for missiles as it cuts funds for the Women/Infant/Children Program that provides
diet supplements and medical checkups for mothers in poverty. Surely, I said, they should
not emulate the President in these matters - and here I stole a line from
Congressman Barney Frank - they should not emulate the President in being
pro-life only up to the moment of birth. Well the faces before me began to close, and from
the middle and the back of the dining room there were shouts. I couldn't make out the
words, but they were not approving. As I went on, there were more shouts as well as growls
and table-thumping of an insistence that indicated a tumbrel awaited outside. I finally
ended my speech to a chorus of howls, and several of the diners rushed toward the dais. I
did not remember ever intending to die for this cause, but as it turned out the attacks
were all verbal. Most of the disappointed listeners, once they caught their breath,
charitably ascribed my failure to understand the total unrelatedness of nuclear arms and
abortion to my not yet having found God.

But I discovered in other places that I didn't have to bring them the
news of the consistent ethic of life. I talked at the Catholic church outside Stamford,
Connecticut last week, and they - including the pastor - understood
the "consistent ethic of life" agreat deal better than I did. So I see some real
hope for my point of view.

There are a lot of people like me out there who are troubled by
abortion. That should not stop them from joining at least one of the more possibly
compatible groups, but it does. They are unwilling to join what they consider to be the
forces of Reagan, Rambo and Rehnquist. But there are beginning to be pro-life forces that
they can in conscience - they have consciences too - join. One of them
is Pro-lifers for Survival, another is Feminists for Life of America. And there is
something that just started that I find very interesting. It's very small now. It's the
first consistent-ethic-of-life political action committee, and it's called JustLife. The
people who started it were some what dismayed that anti-abortionists like Jerry Falwell,
Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart and other such household names were giving the impres sion
that if Christ were in the Senate, he'd vote for Star Wars. The founders of JustLife
thought that a new assembly of Christians - most of them, by the way,
theologically conservative evangelicals and Catholics - ought, there fore, to
start the political action committee.

What they aim to show is that there is another Christian perspective on
these matters. JustLife is supporting candidates who advocate what it calls, again, a
"consistent ethic of life." A candidate does not have to be a Christian to get
help from this PAC, but he or she does have to oppose abortion. Another requirement is a
determination to end, rather than further institutionalize, the nuclear arms race. They're
against the MX missile. They're against Star Wars. Now I think you see that the nuclear
part of their program is mild. I'm a disciple of A. J. Muste. He was a Christian pacifist.
The new PAC does not go so far as Muste or Dorothy Day. Instead, it urges verifiable
multi-lateral disarmament. Everybody's for that, except when you get to the negotiating
table. One board member, Kathleen Hayes, who is managing editor of the Christian magazine,
The Other Side, told the Catholic Register that she believes that unilateral
disarmament is ultimately what the gospel would call us to. But the aim of JustLife is to
pick up votes, and there's a much more powerful gospel if you want to pick up votes, and
that's called deterrence.

The third basic criterion the candidate has to meet to get money from
JustLife, is that he or she must recognize that there are actual poor people out there
- not just freeloaders, as the Attorney General has suggested. Once the poor are
seen as three dimensional, a JustLife candidate has to show that he or she would work to
get them health care, housing and food. For as it was said, "Blessed are the hungry,
for they shall be filled." Distilling its tripartite credo in its first fundraising
letter, JustLife em phasizes, "[W]e support an unborn child's right to life. We also
support that child's right to adequate nutrition, housing, education and health care. We
support that child's right to live in a safe world."

Now this political witness by Christians going contrary to the politics
of most other pro-life groups - that is, those pro-life groups that have
political agenda- is obviously well within the rights of free speech and
assembly. Yet another interesting thing, and I find this dismaying, is that while a number
of Catholic bishops agree with the thrust of JustLife - in fact one of them was
originally on the board, and a consistent ethic of life is now an official position of the
National Conference of Catholic Bishops as of last November - there are no
Catholic bishops on the board of JustLife. The main reason is that there is a current
lawsuit brought by Larry Lader, the pro-abortionist, challenging the tax-exempt status of
the Catholic church on the charge that it has been engaged in political campaigning and in
lobbying against abortion. Because of the length of that suit, its cost and its still
uncertain outcome, the bishops are experiencing a chilling effect. And I've seen no
editorials about that from people who would ordinarily be concerned with the First Amend
ment.

Meanwhile, JustLife, having announced publicly its existence in June,
has raised $45,000 from 1,300 contributors, expects to reach $60,000 by the end of the
year and is gearing up for 1988. I'll show you how it works in one state, because this
could eventually happen elsewhere. In Nevada, the Pro-Family Coalition has endorsed
Republican James Santini, but since Santini is against both the nuclear freeze and funding
for poverty programs, JustLife is on the side of Congressman Harry Reid, who votes to fill
the hungry, slim down the Pentagon and is also against abortion. They're both against
abortion, but only one, says JustLife, keeps on caring for life after birth. I would like
to see this group grow, and other groups do the same thing or similar things. [Reid won in
November.]

On Sunday October 25th, Cardinal O'Connor had a letter read at all
masses at all parishes in the Archdiocese of New York. It was Respect Life Sunday. And
this is how the letter began: "I am frightened and chilled by the continuing
destruction of unborn human life, and now we are seeing precisely what we have been
predicting all along. Once the victory seemed to be won on legalizing the killing of the
unborn, attention was turned to the terminally ill. Now we are hearing a clamor thoughout
the United States for legislation that will lift any regulations whatsoever in regard to
sustaining the life of a terminally ill patient. Indeed the move is toward authorizing the
deliberate speeding up of the deaths of vulnerable patients by starvation or dehydration.
It all goes together. What is permitted today is often demanded tomorrow. If the current
contempt for the unborn continues, in my judgment we will soon see required genetic
screening programs, with public health authorities urging mothers to abort babies that may
be born with defects. I've been reading that this summer the state of California has
introduced a program which moves precisely in that direction. I plead with you to reflect
with utmost urgency on what is happening. Do not think that your life, or your aging
parents' lives, or the lives of the handicapped, the cancerous, the so-called 'useless,'
are secure if the proponents of euthanasia have their way."

Finally, with that in mind, back in 1971, two years before Roe v.
Wade, in the state of New York, the legislature, after much pressure, decided to
decriminalize abortion and make it a good deal easier. At the time, a significant
editorial was delivered on the local CBS station by Sherri Henry, who has since become a
big-time talk show host. And she wrote then, "[A]bortion is no longer illegal in New
York. It is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to fear. It is one sensible method of
dealing with such problems as overpopulation, illegitimacy, and possible birth defects. It
is one way of fighting the rising welfare rolls and the increasing number of child abuse
cases.

Very simple. When there are no children, they can't be abused. When
there are no severely handicapped children or adults, we will all save money. When
everyone in failing health has to die by a certain age, how much more aesthetic our
society will be.

Most people will begin to understand the lethal logic of the
abortionists, the advocates of euthanasia, and the AMA, if this logic is presented
lucidly, persistently and on the basis of the indivisibility of all life. All life.